Dan Ariely’s Students Conduct Experiment on Cheating

By

Christopher Shea

Aug 10, 2011 10:21 am ET

First, a snapshot from the classroom of an elite university, in 2011, courtesy of Dan Ariely, author of “The Upside of Irrationality”:

At the start of last semester, I asked my undergraduate students whether they had enough self-control to avoid using their computers during class for non-class related activities. So they promised that if they used their laptops, it would only be for course-related activities like taking notes. However, as the semester drew on, I noticed that progressively more and more students were checking facebook, surfing the web and emailing. At the same time that they were facebooking more and more, they were also cheating more and more on their weekly quizzes – and in a class of 500 students, it was hard to manage this deterioration. As my students’ attention and respect continued to degrade, I became increasingly frustrated.

Two of his students then took it upon themselves to run a little experiment. They wrote an email purporting to be from someone in the class (the identity was fictitious but plausible), saying that the author had some inside dope on how to get answers for the final exam, in advance. The email went out to everyone in the class….